Despite the sirens call of the empty road drifting outside the passenger window and the steady vibration of the truck on the road Eric couldn’t force himself to slip into a nap. His mind was still stuck on Charles and the sudden end he had chosen for himself. He hadn’t hesitated, he hadn’t wavered, he had done what he had thought was best and Eric respected the man for that but he wasn’t so sure that under similar circumstances that he’d do the same with as much confidence. Sanchez had asked that a few of the men staying behind at the farmhouse dig and bury Charles. The zombies were going to be burned in the cleared out area in front of the farmhouse that they had been using as a drive way. Despite the risks of being killed and coming back as a zombie Eric felt that he had dodged a bullet by coming with the rest of the group to Davenport rather than burying the Airman. Gravedigger was not a job we wanted to every try his hand at.
The fields outside the window of the truck passed by mile after mile all of them were barren dark wet dirt waiting for the new crop to be up in. Sanchez had pulled Brian aside as they small group was leaving and asked the farmer to start coming up with some plans for farming and food production. Brian had been relieved, he had asked how he might earn his place in the community developing at the farmhouse and it was apparent that he preferred farming to killing zombies. Eric couldn’t blame the guy, he had a family to protect, one of the few full intact families at the farmhouse and that small thing was more precious than gold.
“What are you thinking about kid?” Eric could feel Sanchez’s dark compassionate eyes on him but he refused to turn and meet the man’s eyes. He wanted to simmer in his melancholy for a little while longer. Sanchez’s gaze rested on Eric for a few seconds and when the younger man didn’t turn to meet his eye he turned his attention back to the road.
“Do you think we’re going to make it,” Eric’s voice was flat and lasted with a touch of despair. He had always struggled with a mild form of depression that usually took root around spring and fall but it reared its dark head whenever things looked particularly bleak. That bleak outlook use to be reserved for concerns about losing his job or after a particularly nasty fight with Lindsey but with the end of the world and possibly humanity a reality standing at their doorstep Eric was bogged down in his dark mood.
“Whether our little community survivors a week, a year, or a decade the important part is that we tried.” Sanchez turned took his eyes of the road for a minute and found Eric’s droopy basset hound eyes looking back at him. “Sometimes it’s more important that you fought the fight rather than whether you won or lost it.” Sanchez’s chin dipped slight nodding either for Eric’s reassurance or for his own before he turned his eyes back to the road and the truck in front of him.
Eric turned his eyes back to the fields rolling by as they continued due west to Davenport. He was just started to slip back into his drab thoughts when the comforting rumble of Sanchez’s voice shoved him away from the pit, “People need a chance to live, something to hope for. How many of these people would have lived out their last days huddled in a room starving and broken waiting for these terrible things to get them? The farmhouse and what we are doing there is as much about giving people something to hope for as it is about actually survival.”
“It would comfort me more knowing that what the farmhouse stands for is more tangible then people’s desperate hope.” Eric glanced across the cab at Sanchez and could for an instant see the fear and desperation that the man was trying to crush under his own hope. The Hispanic officer didn’t look at him but he must have felt Eric’s eyes on him cause in an instant swallowed the fear and doubt and replaced the façade with iron hard optimism. Eric was happy to see that he wasn’t the only one wrestling with these concerns but he also saw the value in Sanchez’s unerring confidence, “I’d rather fight for something more than just another few seconds of breath for myself. Fighting and possibly dying to keep others safe for another day seems like the best thing for a person to devote their life to.” Eric watched as a trace of a smile tickled the corner of Sanchez’s lip before hardening into a grim façade of determination.
As his eyes drifted across the contours of the dashboard the outline of Davenport came into view along the horizon. It was something to behold, small farming towns seemed to materialize out of the mist like a mirage across much of Eastern Washington. Eric could see to his far right the three forked wings of the hospital at davenport. The plan was to avoid the hospital at all costs. There was no telling if the zombies had made it this far West but the assumption was at anywhere anyone went outside of the farmhouse zombies would already be there and a hospital was the epicenter of an outbreak, especially in a small town. It was a shame they couldn’t risk going to the hospital, eventually the people living at the farmhouse were going to have need for medical supplies. Even aspirin was a luxury now and they didn’t have much of it back home.
As the small convoy of trucks drew closer to the town the beginnings of the turmoil that had unfolded as the zombie swept through the town and devastated the living could be seen. The houses on the Eastern edge of the town and closest to the hospital were the worst hit. Jagged shards of glass smiled crooked smiles at Eric as they rolled into town. Most of broken windows had stains of blood on them smiling like nightmare monsters at the living that had coming willingly into his maw.
Worse still were the bodies. They were scattered across yards, driveways, and even splayed across the road in front of the trucks like the haphazardly discarded playthings of small children. The truck in front of Sanchez and Eric rolled over one of the bodies laying in the streets bumping slightly on his shocks as it trundled over the human speed bump. Eric looked away as the truck in front of them crawled over the body but his view changed from bad to worse. In the driveway of the house to his right a body sat in a puddle of dark dried blood and gore next to an SUV with a roof rack piled dangerously high with family belongings. There was no way to tell the gender of the body a little to suggest it was ever a person to begin with. The abdomen looked as if someone had jammed a stick of dynamite in its belly button and lit the fuse. Eric could see where something had savagely ripped and broken ribs clawing with ravenous hunger into the body’s chest for more succulent flesh. Along the white door panel the elongated bloody streaks of fingers still feebly trying to find safety inside the car but unable grab the handle and save itself. As the truck moved cautiously through the scattered wreckage of the businesses and homes along Morgan Street Eric could see through the large front window of the house a silhouetted shadow lurking in the house. It moved with the mechanical jerks and twitches of a zombie. Through the little light that filter into the house from other windows Eric could make out enough of the zombies features to know that this now shambling emaciated corpse was a wife who’d watched her husband die trying to save them and then fallen victim to the same monsters they’d tried to flee from.
As the truck moved along Eric tried to keep his mind off of the images his eyes tried to avoid but couldn’t keep from finding. The destruction of life was so profound here that every turn found new horrors not even conjured in the minds of the most depraved souls. Davenport was a miniature of what Spokane would look like and what most of the country if not the world looked like now. Evidence of the hopeless attempts to flee the dead and signs of the innumerable failures to do so littered the streets and yards that the convoy passed. And scattered among the carnage of lives and families torn apart by the dead the reanimated bodies of zombies lumbered and lurched.
The torn up and chewed on bodies of the dead pocked the landscape of the small rural town in mockery of the quaint lifestyle such small towns cultivated. As Sanchez drove past the first few streets it didn’t look like too many of the dead had risen back up but the deeper into town they went the numbers skyrocketed. Eric had been trying to keep track already planning their escape from the town if they were forced to fight their way out but in the growing press of bodies he had lost count. “Sanchez, any idea how big this town is?”
The Hispanic officer chewed on a toothpick that he had been gnawing on since they had left the farmhouse for a few seconds before answering, “My mother told me that the last time the census came through there was something like seventeen hundred people in Davenport.”
Davenport was barely one hundredth the size of Spokane but with just eight men on this run and an untold number of zombies scattered around the town Eric didn’t like their odds. There was some wisdom in sending a small group, they could get in and out quickly, they didn’t make too much noise and it discouraged guys from attacking the dead but the small group could be overwhelmed pretty easily too. “How do you think we’re going to get out of here?”
“By being smart kid,” Sanchez’s response was direct and to the point, there was no way anyone on this run was getting out of here without being on their toes. Eric looked through the side mirror on his side of the truck and spotted just two zombies out of the numerous corpses they’d passed following the truck. Crossing his fingers Eric hoped that they wouldn’t attract too much more attention from the zombies.
Sanchez slowed the truck down as the convoy neared and intersection. Three cars had collided as they had sped against the flashing red light and jammed up the intersection. An arm that had been chewed down to the bone dangled out the open window of a maroon four door sedan. Blood and bits of flesh splattered the door panel and dripped down to the asphalt. Resting in a pool of red rust colored blood was the black metal of a handgun. As Sanchez slowed to a caterpillar crawl as the trucks navigated around the clogged intersection Eric pushed his door open and jumped out. He scooped up the gun and was just peaking into the back seat of the car when the arm twitched and spasmed like a seizure patient and a raspy wheeze of a growl escaped the cracked and bloody lips f the corpse in the passenger seat.
The crack of the shot was echoing down the vacant streets of Davenport before Eric knew what had happened. He watched helplessly as the bullet caught the zombie below its left eye and its head snapped back as the impact of the bullet traveled through the soft rotting flesh of the creature’s head. The shot rang out for miles the smoking barrel of the gun wavering as Eric’s hand shook at the realization that he had just struck the dinner bell for any zombie in the area.
The dead zombie slumped against its seatbelt dangling inches above the lap of the dead man in the driver’s seat. As Eric started backing away from the car he watched as the corpse in the driver’s seat turned the blackened cataracts of its eyes on him. Blood was caked in the zombies beard dribbling down its chin and onto the white shirt stretched across its chest. It opened its jaws which Eric thought were creaking like warped wood as a hissing wild growl barely a whisper escaped its mouth.
“Get in the goddamn truck kid we’ve got to go.” Sanchez’s normally calm face was burning red with anger his teeth bared as he spit out the commands to Eric. Eric did as he was told and jumped into the truck. Sanchez was reaching out with his hand and once his hard grip was around Eric’s wrist he jerked the kid into the truck as Eric’s right hand grabbed the handle and yanked the door closed.